Fun and Terror in Fargo
I had been reading about the Fargo-Moorhead Skylarks and the Red River Valley Championships for 50 years, and I’d been looking for an opportunity to go. This year it was a week after the Nats and sorta on the way home. The club field, at which the contest is held, is in a shady park on the banks of the Red River. The field has endured floods and a hostile parks board member over the decades, but is well-maintained and pretty. The stunt circle is surrounded by tall trees and looks scary. I arrived at 3 PM Saturday intending to say hello and hang out, the PAMPA contest calendar having said that stunt was to be flown Sunday. It appeared that stunt was in progress. I inquired and was told that I was on deck. I extracted the dog, put a battery on the charger at 7 amps, and rolled out my lines. Sure enough, the wind was extremely turbulent and scary. A strongly built weathervane next to the circle was gyrating randomly. My tricks always seemed to be sideways to the wind: sometimes one side, sometimes the other. I was running backward, but then had to avoid hitting trees at the edge of the circle. Vertical maneuvers involved a lot of rolling and free flight. In electric stunt, as opposed to space, everybody can hear you scream. Golly, I hardly was acquainted with my new dog and was starting to like it. Seeing the LiPo spew fire in the crash would be cool, but not that much consolation. Somehow I made it through as many of the tricks as I could remember and bounced to a stop. I was shaking like the leaves on the surrounding trees, and they were shaking indeed. The other guys just figured I was overemotional, I guess. They flew and got blown around without a whimper. These are sturdy Paul Bunyan types who endure hard winters and turbulent stunt circles without complaint. I was then informed that the score for the day would be the sum of two flights, and it was time for the second. I burst into tears. The second flight was a little less scary than the first, but was quite scary.
The Fargo contest has a lot of tradition. Much of the Fargo diaspora returns for it. Jeff Johnson came back from Wichita, and Pete Mazur, the carrier guy, from Illinois. I caught up on Olson family genealogy. A generation has gone by since I last saw them at the Reno Nats. Aimee, then approximately sweet sixteen, is a mommy now with kids taller than she is. Aimee’s husband was there flying and pitting. He’s a nice guy, although it took a good woman to straighten him out: he used to fly RC. Angela, the youngest, whom I think we knew as Annie, also has kids, including Lydia, who is cute as a button and sharp as a tack. Abbie, the second oldest sister, who could switch her handle including safety thong between hands to get out of a combat line tangle, was not at the contest. She is (or soon will be) living in Oklahoma City.
There was a nice meal at the field Saturday evening, and some balloon busting. Jeff Johnson has developed a lot of style over the years flying combat, which he employed busting balloons. A stunt final – gulp—was to be held Sunday morning, so I retired to the hotel to gird my loins. The Natural Weather Service predicted 8 to 10 MPH winds Sunday, which refrightened me, until I saw that the weather in which we had flown Saturday was 13 gusting to 20-something.
My morning stunt flight was not too awful, except for maybe the tornado that sat on the upwind side of the circle and shook the dog violently each inverted lap. I felt pretty cocky after landing until learning that the total score included that from yet one more flight. A little pants-wetting free flight in the vertical eight, two more tricks, and I got to save my plane for another day. Yippee. I judged some combat with grandpa Mike Olson and Aimee’s daughter Hayley, whose name I hope I got right. Pete Plunkett had a lovely flyaway. At first it came straight down at us, and I found myself trying to hide behind a large tree, but tree trunks run parallel to vertically descending combat plane trajectories, so it wasn’t working. The plane reversed direction, then passed just over a house on the west side of the park. Curiously, if it had flown the same distance either due north or due south, it would have landed in Minnesota. At the closing ceremony, Mike Olson told us he has pancreatic cancer. He asked for our prayers.
The rest of the trip home was hot, pleasant, and uneventful. I mowed the lawn and pressure-washed the car before being admitted to the house.
Topic: Home from the Nats (Read 3534 times)
